Hacker Lexicon: What Is Password Hashing?

Digital megabreaches have lately become so commonplace as to be almost indistinguishable on the alarm scale—a hundred million passwords stolen from one social media service one day, a few hundred million more the next. It all becomes a depressing blur. But not all password disasters are equally disastrous. And the difference between a Three Mile Island and a Hiroshima sometimes comes down to an arcane branch of cryptography: hashing.